In
contrast to the conventional belief that gossip and social exclusion are
malicious and should be avoided, researchers found sharing “reputational
information” could have a positive effect on society.

Gossip
can help social groups to reform bullies, encourages co-operation and stops
“nice people” being exploited, according to the study, published in the journal
Psychological Science.

Dr
Matthew Feinberg, a researcher at Stanford University in the United State who
co-wrote the study, said: “Groups that allow their members to gossip sustain
co-operation and deter selfishness better than those that don’t.

“And
groups do even better if they can gossip and ostracise untrustworthy members.

“While
both of these behaviours can be misused, our findings suggest that they also
serve very important functions for groups and society.”

No one gossips about ideas. We gossip about other people. In so doing, we exchange what the authors call “reputational
information.”

We offer each other information about the character of other
people. When we gossip we are telling each other who is more likely to work
well with others and to respect others. Perhaps more pertinently, we are
telling each other who is self-involved, self-absorbed and selfish.

When people discover that someone is in it for himself and that he shows
no group loyalty or concern for other people, we conclude that he is more likely to exploit
others and we exclude him from our group. Like it or not, it's the rational thing to do.

There is nothing wrong with judging someone by the "content of his character."

The Telegraph continues:

The
researchers found that when people learn about the behaviour of others through
gossip, they use the information to ally themselves with those deemed
co-operative.

People
who have behaved selfishly can then be excluded from group activities based on
the gossip.

This
benefits the whole group as the more selfish types are no longer able to
exploit more co-operative people for their own gains.

The researchers suggest that the threat or the reality of
social exclusion motivates people to overcome what we may call their narcissism.
It’s worth emphasizing the point, as I have done on many other occasions, that
ostracism or the threat of same can be therapeutic.

The Stanford researchers discovered this:

When
people deemed selfish suffer social exclusion they often learn from the
experience and reform their behaviour by co-operating more in future group
settings, the team found.

As is well known to those who participate in chat boards or
who leave comments on blogs, when people can hide behind the mask of anonymity,
they tend to indulge in anti-social behaviors:

When people have names, they are putting their own reputations at risk, and thus are less likely to use gossip to lie and slander. Anonymity is not a normal or natural condition;
it is an artificial contrivance that produces bad behavior.

According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and
Development, overall foreign investment in Europe increased last year. It
increased in Germany by 392% to £19.6 billion. In Spain it rose by 37% to
£22.4 billion. Great Britain led all nations in the Eurozone, attracting foreign
investment of £32 billion.

The one exception to this rule was France. Under the
leadership of Social president Francois Hollande, foreign investment in France fell
by 77% to £3.5 billion.

Not what you would call a vote of confidence in Hollande’s
leadership.

The
increasingly dire performance by France, which is the Eurozone’s second largest
economy, is a cause of huge concern for neighbours including Britain.

Other
new figures released this week show France’s unemployment and poverty rates
soaring to new highs.

Despite
the Mr Hollande’s highly publicised ‘promise’ that he would get the jobless
figures down in 2013, the number rose by 10,200 in December.

It now
stands at 11.1 per cent, or well over 3.3 million – a figure which
rises to almost 5 million if those in part-time temporary jobs are taken into
consideration.

Meanwhile, a damning new survey shows
that the poverty rate in France is at 14 per cent – the highest for 17 years.

Researchers
from social policy consultants COMPAS found that 8.7 million French people live
below the poverty line.

For the record, the population of France is 65.8 million.

Of course, Socialist president Hollande declared war on the
rich. He has done everything in his power to raise taxes on the rich. He has
stood tall as a champion of the poor and the oppressed.

A lot of good that has done the poor.

The Daily Mail says that it’s an embarrassment. That’s the
least you can say. Perhaps this explains the real reason why President Hollande
was sneaking out of the Elysee Palace in the dead of night. He was not trying
to escape the woman who is now his former paramour. He was trying to put more
distance between himself and a job he doesn’t know how to do.

Like you, I have strong suspicions about the Justice
Department's felony indictment of Dinesh D’Souza. I have not commented on it because I
do not know the law well enough to offer an informed opinion.

Like you, I have not been surprised to see the great media
champions of the first amendment falling silent at the judicial persecution of
an opponent of the Obama administration. Theirs is truly the silence of the
lambs.

Since the administration has obviously gotten away with
using the IRS to hamper on the free speech rights of its political opponents,
why not keep on doing it?

Yesterday, famed Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz called
the Justice Department to account. His is only one voice, but an important one.
Beyond being an expert on the law, Dershowitz is a notable Democrat. This makes
his critique of the Holder Justice Department that much more trenchant.

Speaking to Newsmax, Dershowitz said:

This is
clearly a case of selective prosecution for one of the most common things done
during elections, which is to get people to raise money for you…. If they went
after everyone who did this, there would be no room in jails for murderers.

Newsmax continues:

The
Justice Department's tactics remind Dershowitz of the words of Stalin's secret
police chief, Lavrentiy Beria, who said, "Show me the man and I’ll find
you the crime."

"This
is an outrageous prosecution and is certainly a misuse of resources,"
charged Dershowitz. "It raises the question of why he is being selected
for prosecution among the many, many people who commit similar crimes.

"This
sounds to me like it is coming from higher places. It is hard for me to believe
this did not come out of Washington or at least get the approval of those in
Washington."

Will these words make any difference? Probably not.

Without the support of the mainstream media, these stories
will go unnoticed.

Democrats have used prosecutorial power to destroy the
political careers of Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Tom DeLay… why not continue to do
what works.

Thursday, January 30, 2014

The more we think about depression, the more we devote
resources to curing depression, the more depression there is.

When Prozac arrived on the scene it was touted as a cure for
depression. For many people it still serves to help, but it has certainly not put
an end to depression. In fact, there seems to be more depression now than there
was in the pre-Prozac era.

Perhaps
the most troubling and ironic thing about the toll of depression is that it has
risen while more research and treatment resources have been poured into
combating it. In fact, depression represents an $83-billion annual burden to
the United States economy in lost productivity and increased medical expenses.
Why aren’t we winning this fight?

What’s wrong with our approach to depression? Rottenberg
suggests that we are failing to cure depression because we see it as a defect.
He recommends that we understand depression as way an organism adapts to
adversity. He sees it as a function of low mood.

He explains:

People
in a low mood blame and criticize themselves, turn situations that went wrong
over and over in their heads, and are pessimistic about the future. These
characteristics, although uncomfortable, are also potentially useful. A keen
awareness of what has gone wrong and what can go wrong again can help a person
avoid similar stressors in the future….

If we
had to find a unifying function for low mood across these diverse situations,
it would be that it functions like a cocoon, a place to pause and analyze what
has gone wrong. In this mode, we will stop what we are doing, assess the
situation, draw in others, and, if necessary, change course.

A
variety of experimental data have shown that low mood confers benefits to
thinking and decision making. That lends credence to the idea that mood is part
of a conservative behavioral guidance system that impels us toward actions that
have been successful in the past—meaning, actions that helped our ancestors to
reproduce and spread their genes. One way to appreciate why these states have
enduring value is to ponder what might happen if we had no capacity for them.
Just as animals with no capacity for anxiety were long ago gobbled up by
predators, without a capacity for sadness, we and other animals would likely
commit rash acts and repeat costly mistakes. Physical pain teaches a child to
avoid hot burners; psychic pain teaches us to navigate life’s rocky shoals with
due caution.

Of course, low mood is not the same as depression. We do
well to keep in mind Martin Seligman’s definition of depression: it's the moment
when you convince yourself that you are in a lose/lost situation and give up.

People who are depressed are not conserving their energy
while planning their next move. They are demoralized to the point where they do
not believe that they can do anything to improve their condition. There do not think that there will ever be a next move.

Rottenberg suggests that it’s a question of degree, but it
does feel like a difference of kind.

I agree that there is value in learning from failure, in
ruminating about what went wrong, but knowing why something went wrong tells you
nothing about how to make things go right. The more you ruminate about what
went wrong, the lower your morale will be. The lower your morale, the more
difficult it will be to take decisive action.

If Prof. Rottenberg tells you that ruminating
about what went wrong is a normal mental function, he might be making it
more difficult to overcome depression.

Reflection can help you to plan for the future and to figure
out how you are going to implement the plan. But, this type of reflection
involves the use of imagination. It does not involve belaboring the future. It buttresses your confidence in order to
give you the wherewithal to perform future tasks.

Depressed individuals are often assailed with
self-deprecating thoughts that tell them that they never get anything right. Thus, they believe that nothing is worth trying.

Rottenberg is suggesting that people should stop feeling bad
about feeling bad. He wants them to stop punishing themselves for feeling
depressed. I presume that he wants people to accept low moods as a normal part
of life.

But, this assumes that depression results from a failure to
embrace depression.

If that is his argument—his essay does not make it very
clear—then he has simply redefined the defect. If you are depressed you have
not dealt with your bad moods correctly.

That is not all. Rottenberg also suggests that the cultural
environment contributes to the prevalence of depression.

Changes
in the cultural environment magnify these problems. Triggers include
mood-punishing routines—too much work, too much stimulation, and too little
sleep—and even changes in our attitudes toward sadness. Ironically, our
stratospherically high expectations about happiness have made low moods harder
to bear.

I am not sure we have such stratospherically high
expectations about happiness, but we have certainly been told that depression
is easily curable by taking a pill. The medical profession has created the
expectation. In and of itself, this expectation is likely to cause people to
become more depressed when their illness does not respond to
medication.

The medication-based model of treatment tells people that
there is little they can do on their own, through their own efforts to treat
their depression. Surely, this makes it more likely that people will give up on
their efforts to treat their condition.

Obviously, too little sleep does contribute to depression,
as might too much work. But the lack of career success, caused by
not-enough-work, also contributes. We might say the same for social dislocation
and disaffection.

In closing his article Rottenberg described his own
experience with depression. He explained that none of the treatments he tried worked. The depression, he said, simply exhausted itself.

Is he suggesting that we do better to offer less treatment
for depression? Is he saying that all efforts to treat it are futile?

If so, he is coming perilously close to saying that we
should simply give up. Unfortunately, this is the mindset that causes
depression in the first place.

Perhaps Rottenberg has lit on a paradoxical treatment for
depression. Then again, he might have found one of the ways in which the
culture sustains depression.

Those
who took notes in longhand, and were able to study, did significantly better
than any of the other students in the experiment -- better even than the fleet
typists who had basically transcribed the lectures. That is, they took fewer
notes overall with less verbatim recording, but they nevertheless did better on
both factual learning and higher-order conceptual learning. Taken together,
these results suggest that longhand notes not only lead to higher quality
learning in the first place; they are also a superior strategy for storing new
learning for later study. Or, quite possibly, these two effects interact for
greater academic performance overall.

Of course, studying and writing reports does not stop when
you graduate. Surely, the same rule applies when you are doing research for a presentation.

Many first-rate writers insist that they do better when they
write out early drafts in longhand, only later to retype them into a computer.

Last week, The Onion offered a sardonic view of the difficulty in being a full-time feminist.

It chose the case of feminist, Natalie Jenkins and showed
what happened when Jenkins stopped thinking like a feminist for thirty minutes.

To be perfectly fair, Jenkins sounds less like an everyday feminist and more like a member of the feminist thought police.

Undoubtedly, some will find The Onion version of an everyday
feminist to be a caricature. If they take offense they should write directly to
the editors of The Onion.

The Onion reports:

PORTLAND,
OR—Saying that she just wanted a little time to relax and “not even think
about” confining gender stereotypes, local health care industry consultant
Natalie Jenkins reportedly took a 30-minute break from being a feminist last
night to kick back and enjoy a television program.

Jenkins,
29, told reporters that after a long and tiring day at her office, all she
wanted to do was return home, sit down on her couch, turn on an episode of the
TLC reality show Say Yes To The
Dress, and treat herself to a brief half hour in which she could look
past all the various and near constant ways popular culture undermines the
progress of women.

“Every
once in a while, it’s nice to watch a little television without worrying about
how frequently the mainstream media perpetuates traditional gender roles,”
Jenkins said before putting her feet up on her coffee table and tuning in to
the popular program that follows women as they shop for wedding gowns. “No
mentally cataloging all the times women are subtly mocked or shamed for not
living up to an unrealistic body image, no examining how women are depicted as
superficial and irrationally emotional, and no thinking about how these shows
reinforce the belief that women should simply aspire to find a man and get
married—none of that. Not tonight. I’m just watching an episode of Say Yes To The Dress and
enjoying it for what it is.”

And then:

Jenkins
confirmed that she watched contentedly for the entirety of the television
program, telling reporters that she never once allowed herself to grow
indignant as the adult, employed, and presumably self-respecting women on
screen repeatedly demanded to be made into “princesses.”

Additionally,
Jenkins acknowledged that she witnessed dozens of moments in which the
brides-to-be abandoned the notion that they should be valued for their
personalities and intellects and instead seemed to derive their sole sense of
worth from embellishing their appearance. However, she said she was able to
consistently remind herself that this was “Natalie time” and that the feminist
movement “could do without [her] for 30 minutes.”

Happily for the feminist cause, Jenkins remains committed:

While
affirming that she had fully recommitted herself to the cause of gender
equality as soon as the show’s credits ended, Jenkins admitted she was already
looking forward to the next time she could let herself disregard the many ways
women are reduced to stale caricatures on national television.

“Honestly,
it’s pretty exhausting to call out every sexist stereotype or instance of
misogyny in popular culture, so sometimes I have to just throw my hands up and
grant myself a little time off,” Jenkins said. “And given the state of modern
media, momentarily suspending my feminist ideals is the only way to get through
a night of TV without becoming totally livid or discouraged.”

The moral of the story: it’s not easy being a feminist. Imagine what it's like living with one.

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

David Goldman, aka Spengler surveys the world and is not
happy at what he sees.

Just as they have for decades now, pundits and commentators
are predicting that China will implode. China has not imploded and is not imploding. And
yet, while these sages have been predicting doom for China, many other
countries are in serious trouble.

In Spengler’s words:

I wish
I had a nickel for every prediction of social unrest in China that I’ve read in
the past year. Apart from the risk of stampedes at shopping malls before the
Lunar New Year, China is tranquil. Meanwhile there are several dozen dead in
Cairo overnight, central Bangkok remains under lockdown, street protests are
out of control in Ukraine, Argentines are looting stores during power outages,
and the stink of tear gas still overhangs the public squares of Istanbul from
last year’s demonstrations.

There
is social unrest in a lot of places other than China, and it goes together with
the collapse of local currencies. The Chinese aren’t rioting because they are
gainfully occupied and their wages are rising 15% to 20% a year. Other
so-called emerging markets are in trouble because they are teeming with
people who have nothing remunerative to do.

How to explain the disparity? Spengler argues that the Chinese
are so busy working and earning a living that they don’t have the time, the
energy or the inclination to riot.

In other parts of the world, places where people do not have
a strong a work ethic, the armies of the unemployed have nothing to do but
protest.

In many of these other countries, work has been devalued. The
nations tried to vote themselves rich and have tried to manipulate the
financial markets to fulfill their wishes.

Take Turkey:

Turkey
was supposed to be the poster-boy for prosperity through Muslim democracy.
Instead, it has become an object lesson in emerging market mediocrity, and its
currency is collapsing because it pretended to be something better than that.

The
Turks can spin polyester into sweaters for the Russian market, build washing
machines for Southern Europe, and assemble cars for the Koreans. They can’t
build a smart phone, let alone a modern aircraft, although their military has
put some down-market drones in the air. There are a handful of fine
universities that produce good engineers and financial types, but not enough to
make a dent in the country’s overall economic backwardness.

He continues:

Turkey
is in trouble because the Turks aren’t very good at anything in particular, but
acted as if they were the next China. They borrowed vast sums from the
international market against a glorious future that was never to be. Among all
of the world’s big economies Turkey has the worst current account deficit, at
nearly 8% of economic output, roughly where Greece was before its national
bankruptcy. Investors reckoned that with high economic growth, Turkey would
have no problem carrying its debt; what they did not take into account is that
the growth itself was largely an illusion, a carnival of consumption and
construction that depended on increasing debt in the first place.

As for the Ukraine:

Unrest,
to be sure, has different proximate causes in different places. The Ukrainians
want to join the European Community so that they can leave Ukraine and go to
places where they can earn money. The Turks object to the ruling party’s
stealth construction of an Islamic dictatorship with its attendant cronyism and
corruption. But the common thread in all the financial and social crises which
broke out during the past several months is this: the world economy has left
behind large parts of the world’s people.

And Egypt:

The
Egyptians, with 40% illiteracy and a more than 90% rate of female genital
mutilation, dependent on imports for half their food while 70% of the
population languishes in rural poverty, are the worst off. The Turks have a
future, but it is a humbler and poorer one than their leaders have promised
them. The adjustment of expectations will be wrenching, perhaps violent.

And then there is Argentina:

Argentina,
whose currency collapsed last week, is another case in point. Blessed with
great natural wealth, the Argentines have resented the oligopolies who control
their resources, and try to vote themselves rich with depressing regularity.
One government after another offers handouts to the querulous voters, who have
learned that this practice breeds inflation and currency devaluation. The
Argentine game is to be first in line at the public trough, and first in line
at the foreign exchange counter to get out of local currency before it
collapses yet again.

Such policies are failing around the world. For some strange
reason, they are now coming to America. Spengler believes that the problem is an
inequality of knowledge and even technical skills. How many American jobs are
going unfilled because too few of those who were educated in American schools know
enough to perform them?

Spengler fears that nations promoting “a merciless meritocracy,” will out-compete democracies. Or better, that democratic nations no longer know how to make democracy work.

In Spengler’s words:

The
risk is that the unproductive, unskilled and unemployable portions of the
industrial world’s people will decide to vote themselves rich. Their leaders
encourage this by focusing on income inequality. That is President Obama’s message
as well as the consensus at the World Economic Forum last week at Davos, and it
is nonsense.

The
problem isn’t inequality of income, but inequality of knowledge. One pilot
flying a modern military aircraft could destroy the whole of an ancient
civilization. One farmer from Nebraska can replace a hundred in Egypt. A
thousand years ago, everyone knew how a watermill worked; 200 years ago, most
people knew how a steam engine works; how many people today know how a computer
works?

East
Asia is faring better than the rest of the world in this great transformation
because its culture imposes a merciless meritocracy. The West should be able to
do better than this. If we can’t, we can see our future in Argentina.

As mentioned yesterday and many times previously, Mitt
Romney found that he only people he could speak ill about were his fellow
Republicans. No wonder so many of them did not show up to vote for him.

When Republicans noticed the falloff in votes from its base,
it decided to alienate it even more by supporting immigration reform. Even
after Nate Silver explained that Romney would have had to receive over 70% of
the Hispanic vote to tie Barack Obama, Congressional Republicans seemed
convinced that the solution to their electoral problems was to win more
Hispanic voters.

Since Republicans have not quite grasped their Eleventh
Commandment, it is risky to add a twelfth, but still.

The Twelfth Commandment: Thou shalt never, ever talk about
sex.

Whenever a Republican ventures forth into that uncharted
territory, it comes back to haunt him. Part of the problem is sounding
anti-women. The larger part of the problem is sounding like an ignoramous.

Take Todd Akin, Senate candidate from Missouri, who lost a
highly winnable election he because chose one day to offer his views about “legitimate
rape.”

As I mentioned at the time, many candidates have been
successful running on a pro-life platform, even a modified pro-life platform,
but no one ever succeeds by running on stupid.

Seeing the damage that the remark did to Akin’s candidacy,
Indiana senate candidate Richard Mourdock echoed it in the course of his own
election campaign and lost a senate seat that had been his for the taking.

Mourdock doubled down on stupid. Is there a lesson there?

Today’s Republicans are more intelligent about their
comments, but still, they should know by now that they should, never, ever talk
about sex.

Witness presumptive presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. At
a meeting of the Republican National Committee Huckabee threw down the gauntlet:

If the
Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they
are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a
prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their
libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so
be it.

Strictly speaking, Huckabee was attributing thoughts to
Democrats. He said that Democrats had promoted policies that were based on the
supposition that women could not control their libido or their reproductive
system without the government’s help.

Unfortunately, no one heard it that way. Huckabee’s effort
to stand up for women’s freedom looked to just about everyone like Republican
meddling in women’s reproductive choices. After all, if Huckabee wants
government out of the reproduction business, one imagines that he would be
opposed to most restrictions of abortion.

Quite frankly, politicians should not be opining about
anyone’s libido. Period. End of story. It’s a losing game. Women do not want
their libidinous urges to be part of the political dialogue.

And then there was Rand Paul.

Last week, looking for a wedge issue against Hillary
Clinton, Paul declared that her husband, former president Bill “Horndog”
Clinton was a sexual predator. You recall, Bill Clinton had a dangerous liaison
with an intern named Monica Lewinsky.

For his pains Rand Paul was slapped down by Wall Street
Journal editorial board member Dorothy Rabinowitz.

In her words:

A
striking argument, that, considering the nature of the charges Mr. Paul was
making. Namely, that Bill Clinton had "taken advantage of a young woman in
the workplace," a charges he repeated three times with some variations:
The victim was "a young girl" that was "20 years old" and
an "intern." "Bosses," the senator summarized,
"shouldn't prey on young interns."

When
the matter of bosses taking advantage of young women—preying on them—comes up,
most of rational society understands the action involved. The women are
threatened, implicitly or explicitly, with loss of their jobs, or chased around
the office, or pursued with offers of dinner, pleas for assignations, told
suggestive jokes.

Mr.
Paul, perhaps busily immersed in his Ayn Rand studies in the 90's, may not have
noticed who was chasing whom during the Clinton intern scandal. He seems not to
know today that his picture—that of a hapless young girl of 20, victimized,
honor despoiled by her boss, the president, preying on her—bears no resemblance
to reality.

The
starry-eyed Monica Lewinsky had made no secret of her determination to get to
the head of the rope line to make herself and her availability known to the
president at every one of his public appearances she could get to. She worked
hard getting to him. She lost no chance to make it clear that she was ready and
willing to offer sexual service to him at any time.

Rabinowitz finds it all to be rather discouraging. She sees
it as a bad omen for a potential Paul candidacy:

Mr.
Paul's conversion of these facts into a story of innocence betrayed by Mr.
Clinton doesn't bode well for a national candidate who is, we keep hearing, a
savvy politician careful not to sound extreme—sound like his father, Ron Paul,
that is—or make mistakes. Flailing away now at Mr. Clinton's disgraceful past,
and in the way that he has, suggests a serious kind of tone deafness in this
likely candidate for the Republican nomination—a kind that has always been
there under the spiffed up surface, and one likely to emerge again.

Had Rand Paul been willing to mention Juanita Broadderick,
it might have been another story, but, even then, the Clinton sexcapades are by now common
knowledge. No one wants to revisit them. No one wants to have to think about
them again. If you bring them up the public will blame you for forcing it to
think about things it does not want to think about.

Good Republicans should ask themselves how that one worked
out the first time. They might have impeached Bill Clinton, but it was, at the
least, a Pyrrhic victory.

Today, the nation lionizes the horndog president, to the
point where it seems poised to put his enabling wife in the White House.

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

If you want to know what went wrong with the Romney
campaign, you need look no further to the headline on Patrick Howley’s Daily
Caller column:

Romney
breaks silence on Candy Crowley’s debate interference

It took Mitt Romney fifteen months to respond to Candy
Crowley’s egregiously irresponsible and highly partisan interference in the
second presidential debate between him and President Obama.

What was he waiting for? Romney should have responded in
fifteen seconds.

Romney responded vigorously to his fellow Republicans in the
primary debates. He attacked his fellow Republicans fearlessly in the same
debates.

And yet, when it came time to attack President Obama and his
enablers in the media, Romney became Casper Milquetoast. Apparently, he was
afraid of the mainstream media and Barack Obama. The only people Romney and
many other Republicans are not afraid to attack are ... their fellow Republicans. No other explanation makes any sense at all.

Howley describes Romney’s current decision to break his
silence about Candy Crowley:

Former
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney offered a harsh critique of CNN
debate moderator Candy Crowley’s interference in his second debate with
President Obama in 2012.

Crowley
infamously butted in to an exchange between Romney and Obama regarding the
Obama administration’s changing of the Benghazi talking points. Crowley’s
assertion that Obama was right in the argument led to multiple rounds of
applause in the studio audience — an agonizing moment that was featured
prominently in the new behind-the-scenes Netflix documentary “MITT.”

Howley describes Romney’s current attitude:

“Well,
I don’t think it’s the role of the moderator in a debate to insert themselves
into the debate and to declare a winner or a loser on a particular point. And I
must admit that at that stage, I was getting a little upset at Candy, because
in a prior setting where I was to have had the last word, she decided that
Barack Obama was to get the last word despite the rules that we had,” Romney
said.

“So she
obviously thought it was her job to play a more active role in the debate than
was agreed upon by the two candidates, and I thought her jumping into the
interaction I was having with the president was also a mistake on her part, and
one I would have preferred to carry out between the two of us, because I was
prepared to go after him for misrepresenting to the American people that the
nature of the attack,” Romney said.

Even today, when Romney has broken his silence, his words
bespeak cowardice. He says he “was getting a little upset” with her. He thought
her jumping into the action was “a mistake on her part.”

How weak can you get?

As for Romney’s professed interest in going after the
president over Benghazi, he could done it at any time and in any place. He did not.

The Romney campaign did not go out with a bang; it went out
with a whimper.

If one of your friends tends to be open and honest in all
things with all people and another of your friends will take your secrets with
him to the grave, which one would you confide in?

Is it even a contest?

Keep in mind, the closeness of your relationships depends in
very good part on how much you are or are not comfortable confiding.

The therapy culture has given people the impression that it
is bad to keep secrets. And yet, we do better to choose our friends based on their discretion.

How do we know that someone can keep our secrets? Simple, ask yourself how well this person keeps the secrets that other people have confided in
him? If you meet someone who seems constantly to be saying whatever comes to
mind, and who especially enjoys gossiping about other people, you can feel
confident that whatever you confide in him will be repeated to his nearest and
dearest.

In some cases this is an advantage. If you want to send a
message to someone but would rather not risk the confrontation, you might
confide in someone you know to be an incurable gossip.

If you want to attract friends who can keep secrets, demonstrate
to them that you can keep your own.

Obviously, there are more than a few professions that expect,
even demand an ability to keep secrets. Among them are: lawyer, doctor,
therapist, priest and pastor.

What you should or should not confide in whom depends on
situations and circumstances. There is no hard and fast, one-size-fits-all rule
about sharing secrets.

In our culture, many people have come to believe that when
they fall in love they can share everything with the “One.” This is a
commonly-held illusion. It is better to understand that failing to keep secrets
is a character flaw. And who wants to continue to love someone who has a
character flaw, like verbal incontinence.

In some circumstances you should not keep a secret. If
something has happened to you that will directly affect your spouse, you should
share it. You should not hide an illness from your spouse or a significant
change in your career. Since either event can markedly affect your mood, your spouse has right to know what is causing the change in attitude. Otherwise he
or she will naturally think that something has gone wrong between the two of
you.

Obviously, if your changed mood derives from the fact that
you have been flirting up a storm with your secretary, you would do better to keep it
to yourself.

Indiscretion has killed far more marriages than has
cheating.

Unfortunately, the culture seems to suggest that it’s bad to
keep secrets.

But
keeping secrets from a loved one can put an emotional wedge in the relationship
and change the way we communicate. Research shows that when we keep secrets
from a mate, our relationship satisfaction goes down. And the more we ruminate
about a secret, the more we want to reveal it.

"When
we have a secret and mull it over, we develop stress and it makes our body
sick," says Tamara Afifi, professor of communication studies at the
University of Iowa, who studies secrets. "To get our body back to a sense
of health, we need to reveal or cure our self of the secret." Researchers
call this the Fever Model, she says.

Whether anyone should or not keep a secret is a matter for
ethics. Later in her article Bernstein will suggest as much.

Making it a medical issue and allowing, as Prof. Afifi does,
people to believe that revealing secrets is an elixir, is irresponsible. The
way Afifi formulates her point might leave people thinking that it is always a
good idea to reveal secrets to loved ones.

Because, if it is such a bad thing to keep secrets, how does
the professor explain the fact that for many professionals keeping secrets is
a positive achievement. Being unable to keep secrets is for some akin to
malpractice.

Even though Afifi is only talking about secrets that one
might choose to hide from loved ones, she knows well that the message needs to
be qualified.

Bernstein attempts to clarify the point:

How do
you decide whether to reveal a secret? Tread carefully here, experts say. If
telling the secret will hurt someone and produce no benefit, then it shouldn't
be told. Had an affair decades ago? If it's long over and your marriage is
good, mum's the word.

Unless
you have a good therapist, you're on your own on this decision. Dr. Afifi says
examine your motivation. Is it selfish? The desire to get something off your
chest or a feeling of moral obligation to tell aren't good enough reasons to
cause someone else pain. Consider how telling the secret will affect the
listener, the relationship and other people, as well. Weigh long-term benefits
against short-term drawbacks.

In the end, Bernstein’s guidelines are precisely what is
needed. You should not blurt out some bad news, especially news that hurts the
other person or that causes the other person to think less of you because you
have heard that keeping secrets is bad for your health.

Sometimes it's better not to get something off your chest. Always consider whether a secret revealed will cause more pain than the sensation of bottling up an emotion.

Before divulging a secret consider how the information will
change the nature of your relationship, how it will impact the other person and
others, what it will or will not accomplish. Hopefully, a good therapist will
know this and will help you to examine different situations before deciding on the
best course of action.

I suspect that Bret Stephens’ column sits behind a paywall. It’s an interesting reductio ad
absurdum of the current debate over inequality.

Obviously, income inequality exists. It has gotten worse
during the Obama administration. In a competitive world outcomes cannot always
correspond to your ideal version of the a diverse nation, but today, the disparities are so gross that something will
have to be done about it. One suspects that the solution does not lie in making
a fetish of equality and trying to produce it by legislation.

Since Stephens wants to demonstrate the absurdity of
worshipping at the altar of Equality, he introduces his column with a prescient
text from a 1961 story, “Harrison Bergeron” by master absurdist, Kurt Vonnegut.

Vonnegut wrote:

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally
equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every
which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than
anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this
equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution,
and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper
General.

Stephens was inspired to push up
the date and show how equality might be legislated:

The
year was 2019 and Americans were finally on their way toward real equality. Not
just equality in God's eyes, or before the law, or in opportunity.

They
were going to be equal every which way.

All
this equality was due to bold new government action. There was the Decent Wage
Act of 2017, which pegged the minimum wage to the (inflation-adjusted) average
hourly wage of 2016. There was the NEW-AMT, which set a 55% minimum federal tax
rate on individual income over $150,000 (or 80% for incomes above $500,000).
There was the Unemployment Insurance Is Forever Act of 2018. There was the 2018
De Blasio-Waxman CEO Pay Act, which mandated a 9-to-1 ratio between the highest
and lowest paid person in any enterprise.

Stephens tries to be even-handed. In his dystopian
vision, Republicans join the anti-inequality party:

Though
most conservatives were resistant to the Equality Movement, some found the new
political environment congenial to their anti-elitist aims.

There
was the Grassley-Amash De-Tenure Act of 2016, which abolished the
"monstrous inequality" of college-faculty tenure. That was soon
followed by the Amash-Grassley Graduate Student Liberation Act of 2017, ending
the "master-slave" relationship between professors and their teaching
and research assistants.

More
controversial was the Grassley-Gowdy De-Ivy Act of 2018, requiring all
four-year colleges, public or private, to accept students by lottery. Besides
its stated goal of "ending elitism and extending the promise of equality
to tertiary education," many conservatives saw it as a backdoor method of
eliminating affirmative action. Liberals countered that it had precisely the
opposite effect.

It is a bad idea trying to make reality march to the rhythm
of a grandiose ideal.

Monday, January 27, 2014

Here’s how they take away your freedom. Better yet, here's how the new
science of behavioral economics persuades you to hand over your
freedom.

First, they prove “scientifically” that free will does not
exist.

Second, they say that they are just giving you a “nudge” in
right direction.

Third, they force you to do what they want you to do,
because they know best.

Fourth, they tell you that you should be grateful because
your loss is really a gain.

David Bernstein at the Volokh Conspiracy blog exposes the rhetorical
ploy that defines behavioral economics:

You
haven’t been divorced, you’ve been given the opportunity to change to a better
spouse.

You
haven’t been expelled, you’ve been given the opportunity to change to a better
school.

You
haven’t been evicted, you’ve been given the opportunity to change to a better
apartment.

You
haven’t received a cancellation notice for your pre-Obamacare insurance policy,
you’ve been given the opportunity to “change
to a better policy.”

That
last one is from from a New York
Times editorial. Seriously: “The 225,000 Michigan residents who the
ad said received ‘cancellation notices’ were actually told that they could
change to a better policy.”

Don’t worry about it. Once you discover the truth you will
see that it’s all for your best.

Margaret
Rohner worried about her troubled adult son not taking his psychiatric
medications and had been trying to find him proper care in the years leading up
to her horrifying murder at his hands.

The
45-year-old Rohner was viciously attacked Dec 26 with a fireplace poker and
knife, her torso butchered and her intestines pulled out by son Robert O.
Rankin, who was charged with murder after police said he confessed to the
killing.

It was
a tragic end for a woman who had spent years trying to find appropriate care
for her son she called Bobby, a person she desperately wanted to help after
doctors took him off medication prescribed to treat schizophrenia.

If a psychiatrist took Rankin off his medication, then that
person bears some responsibility for what ensued.

Will the psychiatrist ever be held do account? It’s almost
inconceivable.

It’s one thing to know, that, given their druthers, many
schizophrenics do not take their medication. It's quite another for a psychiatrist to tell such a person that he does not need to take them.

As reported:

State Sen. Dante Bartolomeo, who has pushed for improved mental health services
for children, said one challenge for young people with psychiatric problems is
that once they become adults, treatment is generally voluntary and
"medication compliance does become a problem."

As it happened, Margaret Rohner knew what was happening. She
knew her son. She knew what he was capable of. She did everything in her power
to persuade the mental health professionals to help her. Apparently, they
trusted themselves more than they trusted a mother. Besides, as the case of
Adam Lanza demonstrated, it is very difficult in Connecticut to commit a
psychotic against his will.

The Daily Mail described what happened:

Patricia Unan, a close friend, said Rohner expressed frustration to her Dec. 19
about Bobby's deteriorating mental condition since he stopped taking his
medications. Bobby for months had been receiving residential respite services
offered at River Valley Services in Middletown, a program run by the state
Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, according to Bobby's
father.

'She
told me she'd pleaded with the person she spoke with (at River Valley Services)
to hospitalize him and force meds because she recognized when he was headed for
a break down from previous experiences,' Unan wrote in an email. 'She said they
told her they wanted to wait until after the holiday to address the situation.'

The story shows what happens when misguided idealists fail
to understand reality.

Just in case you ever imagined that feminists respected wives and mothers, along comes someone named Amy Glass to disabuse
you of your illusions.

In an absurd post on a blog incorrectly dubbed a “thought
catalogue” Glass lashes out contemptuously at women who choose to be wives and mothers.

Next to backpacking through the Himalayas making a home and
bringing up children is, for Glass, doing nothing.

In her words:

Having
kids and getting married are considered life milestones. We have baby showers
and wedding parties as if it’s a huge accomplishment and cause for celebration
to be able to get knocked up or find someone to walk down the aisle with. These
aren’t accomplishments, they are actually super easy tasks, literally anyone
can do them. They are the most common thing, ever, in the history of the world.
They are, by definition, average. And here’s the thing, why on earth are we
settling for average?

If
women can do anything, why are we still content with applauding them for doing
nothing?

Glass aspires to be exceptional. She feels that a husband and children can only prevent her from fulfilling her potential and becoming exceptional.

She writes:

You
will never have the time, energy, freedom or mobility to be exceptional if you
have a husband and kids.

As one pundit pointed, out Amy Glass should immediately stop
worrying about doing something exceptional. On her best day her mind will never be more than mediocre.

For the women who have not drunk the feminist Kool-Aid,
Glass has nothing but withering and mindless contempt:

I hear
women talk about how “hard” it is to raise kids and manage a household all the
time. I never hear men talk about this. It’s because women secretly like to
talk about how hard managing a household is so they don’t have to explain their
lack of real accomplishments. Men don’t care to “manage a household.” They
aren’t conditioned to think stupid things like that are “important.”

We do need to be grateful to Amy Glass for one thing. She
has shown us the true face of feminist misogyny. Don’t expect an army of
feminists to take to rush out to defend wives and mothers.